FIDLAR – Reading Festival 2019

Festivals are a magical experience – all your favourite bands in one place for one chaotic but brilliant weekend of partying with your best mates? There’s pretty much nothing better for a music lover. But the catch is that not every band can be a headliner – so many times at Reading we found ourselves wishing people could have played a set twice as long, and this is especially true of California skate punks FIDLAR, who tore up the Pit on Sunday evening.

The thirty-degree heat has had crowds sweating buckets all weekend long, so it’s unsurprising that most people are sat down till right before FIDLAR hit the stage, but when they do it’s like they’ve singlehandedly re-energised and rehydrated everyone. Listening to an opener as raucous as the swaggering Alcohol, you’d be hard pressed to stay sitting down if you’d just walked through a desert for three days, and as Zac Carper and co. storm through iconic track after iconic track the undefeatable crowd only gets more energetic.

If there’s one thing that’s a fixture at FIDLAR shows, it’s mosh pits, and there’s definitely no shortage of these tonight. Carper even informs the crowd that FIDLAR are collaborating with Netflix to make a documentary about moshing, (and we hope this is actually true rather than a joke to build hype!!) and invites the crowd to give their best during Drone, which ends up being a pit so merciless that there’s actually not that much movement because people can’t stop falling over. But of course, we’re helped up, and we bounce straight back. That sense of community and looking out for each other is the beauty of punk crowds that we’ve seen time after time this weekend, and it’s even more evident in the riotous girls-only mosh pit that the band request during 5 to 9.

After glorious closer Cheap Beer, it’s hard to believe the set’s actually over – it’s flown by in a haze of shoving and jumping and shouting every word; especially with the weather, it’s as if FIDLAR transported us all to California for forty ecstatic minutes. And we hope they’re back to do the same again next year!